Enhancing literary electronic books with logical structure: electronic work

Purpose – This paper aims to present the concept of electronic work, such as an e‐book integrator of concerns (logical structure, appearance and functionality), for representing literary texts available in electronic heterogeneous environments.Design/methodology/approach – From the generic description of an e‐book and the descriptive requirements of the BiDiLiC project, the concept of electronic work is presented. These requirements involve a descriptive markup policy (based on TEI‐Lite) which defines the text's logical structure and is used for integrating the other concerns associated with the text: functionality and appearance. Finally, the article presents an example showing the integration of the previous concepts to achieve a functional implementation of the electronic work.Findings – The electronic work covers the requirements of classic literary texts, while still allowing other types of texts to be represented easily. For this purpose, a robust logical structure based on TEI is defined, which off...